How a humble coffee became a status symbol, a mortgage payment, and a personality

I have lived in North London long enough to remember when a coffee was a coffee. You walked into a place, you asked for a coffee, somebody gave you a coffee, and you paid for it with coins, like an animal. That world is gone. In its place we have a thriving civilization built entirely around the flat white, a drink that has somehow become a status symbol, a mortgage payment, and, for a worrying number of people I know, an entire personality. I am Lowri Griffiths, I write about this city from my corner of it, and I am here to report that the coffee situation has got completely out of hand.

A Drink That Costs More Than Lunch

The flat white in my local cafe now costs more than a sit-down lunch did when I first moved here, and I am not exaggerating for effect, which I usually am. The price has crept upward so steadily, so relentlessly, that no single increase ever felt outrageous enough to protest, and now here we are, paying for a small cup of coffee what our grandparents paid for a week of groceries. The barista hands it over with the solemnity of a man passing you a vial of something precious, and you accept it, and you say thank you, and you weep quietly into the foam.

The official figures on the cost of living tell a sober story, and bodies like the Office for National Statistics track the relentless rise in the price of everything, but the official figures do not capture the specific psychic damage of watching a flat white pass the four-pound mark and keep going. There is no inflation index for the betrayal you feel when your morning coffee starts costing what your morning coffee should not cost. The economists have failed to measure my pain.

And yet I keep buying it. We all keep buying it. That is the genius and the horror of the North London coffee economy: it has made the flat white feel non-negotiable, a fixed cost of existence, like rent or council tax or the slow approach of death. You would sooner skip a meal than skip the coffee, and the cafes know it, and the price climbs, and we pay, and the cycle continues, and somewhere a man with an excellent beard grows quietly wealthy on our collective inability to make coffee at home.

The Coffee as Identity

What troubles me most is not the price but what the coffee has become. It is no longer a drink; it is a declaration. The order you place announces who you are: the oat milk says one thing, the extra shot another, the elaborate customization a whole worldview. People have built personalities around their coffee orders, identities so fragile they would collapse entirely if the cafe ran out of oat milk, which, in my experience, it always does, at the precise moment you most need it to exist.

I have watched grown adults experience genuine crises when their usual order proves unavailable, standing at the counter, unmoored, no longer sure who they are. The coffee has colonized the self. We are no longer people who drink coffee; we are coffee orders that happen to have bodies attached, drifting through North London in search of the specific caffeinated affirmation that tells us we exist. It is, when you think about it too long, which I have, genuinely concerning.

The cafes have leaned into this, of course, transforming themselves from places that sell coffee into temples of identity, spaces designed for the photographing and the being-seen, where the coffee is almost incidental to the performance of having the coffee. You do not go for the drink. You go to be a person who goes. The drink is merely the ticket of entry to a ritual whose real purpose is the demonstration, to yourself and others, that you are the sort of person who belongs there.

The Quiet Rebellion of the Kettle

There is a resistance forming, and I have joined it, in spirit if not yet in practice. It consists of people who have done the arithmetic, who have calculated what they spend annually on flat whites and then had to sit down, and who have concluded that they could, in theory, make coffee at home, with a kettle, like a person from the past. This is treated, in North London, as a radical and slightly tragic act, the coffee equivalent of going off-grid, and those who attempt it are regarded with a mixture of admiration and pity.

I have a kettle. I have, somewhere in a cupboard, the equipment necessary to produce coffee within my own home. And yet every morning I find myself drawn back to the cafe, back to the four-pound flat white, back to the ritual, because the truth is that I am not buying coffee at all. I am buying the small daily pleasure of leaving my flat, of being among people, of participating in the life of this strange expensive city, and that, it turns out, is the one thing the kettle cannot provide.

So the inflation continues, and I continue to fund it, and North London continues its slow transformation into a place where coffee costs as much as lunch and means more than lunch and matters more than it should. I write about all this and worse over at my home on The London Prat, where I document the small absurdities of trying to live in this city, and where the coffee, inevitably, comes up more than is healthy.

If you too have stood at a counter and questioned everything, you are not alone, and you are not wrong, and the flat white is, objectively, too expensive. Further dispatches from the front line of London life appear at The London Prat, and for the actual cost-of-living figures that confirm none of this is in your head, the Office for National Statistics stands ready to depress you with data.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/